What next after Mars?

ISRO’s Mission to Mars (MOM) has undoubtedly been a spectacular success. The Mars Orbiter or Mangalyaan completed a 10-month journey and entered the red planet’s orbit this September amid great national euphoria and pride.

It was launched from Sriharikota exactly a year ago, on November 5, 2013.

More importantly India became the first nation to reach the orbit of Mars in its maiden attempt. At a relatively small price — $74 million — this is the cheapest interplanetary mission ever to be undertaken, making this an incredible feat of determination, focus and clever engineering by the folks at ISRO, where I too have had the honour of serving.

The media were quick to comment on the Asian space race between India and China and point to the failure of the latter’s Mars mission.

It is true that space missions have strong geopolitical undertones (who can forget the race between the Americans and the Russians?) even while they are ostensibly important scientific missions.

Of tremendous importance during the Cold War, the strategic value of these missions remains equally strong today, though the context may have changed.

While earlier it was more about defence needs, today the context is more the commercialisation of space rather than just militarisation.

Future missions will likely be more collaborative, and public-private partnership is the name of the game as interplanetary colonisation becomes the next step in building a scientific frontier.

NASA and Tesla founder Elon Musk hope to land a man on Mars, using Musk’s SpaceX rocket in a public-private partnership in what NASA dubs the #NextGiantLeap.

Musk has even predicted that in as little as 10 years, humans will land on Mars with or without NASA.

ISRO sees a bigger role for the private sector in the space programme and is working out a business model for larger participation from the private sector so that it can focus better on new developments and research. Nearly 400 companies are currently making several elements of a launch vehicle, including fabrication, testing and assembling. In operational programmes such as PSLV and GSLV, the industry has taken higher responsibility in integrating the satellites.

ISRO’s interplanetary pursuits aside, I see one more area where ISRO’s great expertise can pay rich dividends — one perhaps a bit more terrestrial than the MOM. I believe that ISRO is best placed to facilitate India’s digital mandate — provide connectivity to every Indian by connecting all of India’s over 6,00,000 villages. This seems tailor-made for ISRO. Of the 4 billion people in the world who don’t have access to the internet, almost one-fourth or a billion are in India alone. This one billion has never experienced the magic of the internet. Vast stretches do not have access to reliable internet connectivity, much less adequate broadband. Just imagine the extent to which India would progress if these people could be connected to the rest through always-on, high speed, broadband connection? In a knowledge economy such as India’s, keeping a billion people out of the loop is a sacrilege that deserves urgent attention.

Unfortunately, great network connections do not exist beyond the confines of urban India. Poor network connectivity due to limited spectrum and an insatiable thirst for mobile connectivity by India’s teeming millions has meant that there is no discernible difference between 2G and 3G speeds. The laws of a free market economy dictate that the best services will always go to where the maximum revenues are — and for the foreseeable future that will be in urban India.

ISRO can come to the rescue. As terrestrial spectrum becomes increasingly scarce, ISRO can play a pivotal role in making broadband availability truly ubiquitous by being the third (and much needed) partner to terrestrial networks (wireline and wireless). Already ISRO’s satellites provide mobile companies much needed cellular backhaul services — a necessary and cost effective technology helping operators around India extend their reach.

Interestingly, ISRO is also hard at work to help with India’s financial inclusion by linking India’s villages to bank branches and ATMs through a VSAT network (an area that terrestrial operators usually circumvent as it’s not financially or logistically feasible). As operators expand services, grow subscribers and maintain leadership in a competitive marketplace, they will sooner rather than later require connectivity to bring wireless data services to remote and rural areas. As India gets ready to embrace 4G (also known as LTE) connectivity, ISRO is best suited to enable this. Space spectrum is best suited to provide all-weather and high throughput connectivity that today’s applications demand and similarly satellite spectrum has improved from narrow S and C bands to Ku and now Ka band spectrum. So, with the introduction of 4G services, ISRO could see new opportunities in mobile backhaul that was just not feasible in a GSM environment.

But this will require new technologies that ISRO may not immediately have access to. A new range of international satellites deployed in Europe and America now provide up to 100 Gbps of throughput (using the latest Ka band spectrum) which would be approximately 100 times that of a typical Ku band satellite (that ISRO currently operates). To put this in perspective, a satellite offering such a high throughput would typically be able to offer users 50 Mbps of internet speed. ISRO needs to develop or outright buy or lease and operate one such satellite to provide an enhanced level of broadband connectivity. Time to deploy — a few months at best. And the costs would be a small fraction of what a terrestrial network would entail (typically $500 million would be the cost of the satellite). Existing ground-stations can easily use this spectrum and redeploy it for end-user use.

The world is slowly waking up to realise that spectrum is not an infinite resource (some industry estimates point to a worldwide spectrum crunch by 2020). Given this, satellite-enabled broadband can come to the rescue. Whether it’s C , Ku or Ka band, India can more effectively utilise its ‘space spectrum’ to bridge the deficit and more importantly, ensure digital inclusion and connectivity for its large, unconnected population and regions. ISRO can play the key role.

The writer is the Chancellor of Shiv Nadar University and a former ISRO scientist

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